OK. I was able to get things back up and running. I used Acronis True Image to restore my original Windows 8 as it was out of the box but not into Windows 8 just yet. Something wrong with some missing files. I can now boot into a USB device or from CD/DVD, etc. Will try to restore back to a clean image of Windows 7 that I made and will update you. Anything I could be doing otherwise in the mean time?
Nope. Failed again. It is messed up from that BIOS update. I thought I was out of warranty but my extended coverage does not end until November...so it will be going back for repairs. Just as a recap - when I got this last year, all I did was use that existing permanently modded BIOS 212 from the link I referenced and my laptop was fine. However, recent conflicts made it necessary to need to update to BIOS 300. I simply downloaded it and upgraded to it. After that, I could not boot into Windows 7. Don't know if it was a glitch on my end or if this has happened to others and maybe a new mod needs to be done. On my end everything went perfectly, no crashes, freezes, power outage, weird phenomena...nothing. Oh well. Thanks for the assist and trying to help me. We'll see what happens after warranty service is done with it. I either get it fixed or a $600 check. At this point I would prefer the money to buy new...lol
GA-H81M-HD3 (rev. 1.0) please mod this BIOS for win7 - SLIC 2.1 -Manufacturer: GIGABYTE -Motherboard Model: GA-H81M-D3H (rev. 1.0) -Bios revision: F5 -Bios Type: AMI UEFI -Bios Download Link:http://download.gigabyte.ru/bios/mb_bios_ga-h81m-d3h_f5.zip thanks